From InfoCloud
Sending your IT business to the cloud comes with risk, as those affected by these 10 colossal cloud outages can attest
As a concept, there's a lot to like about the cloud. Drop those bulky servers and get yourself a big, white hard drive in the sky. Someone else handles the upkeep and lets you put your data where you want it. Even the word "cloud" itself brings to mind a heavenly (if slightly fluffy) fantasy. The reality is, of course, a mixed bag. What you gain in avoiding upkeep, you lose in control. And the security concerns are considerable. But nowhere is the nightmare as vivid as it is when your cloud service goes down. Just ask any of the businesses affected by Amazon Web Services' high-profile outage in April. "We were pretty blown away," says Nick Francis, whose startup, Help Scout, had launched just one week prior to Amazon's problem. "We definitely weren't prepared." Francis wasn't the only one caught off-guard. Big-name properties like Reddit and Foursquare fell flat when Amazon's cloud sputtered. "The cloud has been sold as this magical thing that just works and is totally reliable," says Lew Moorman, chief strategy officer of Rackspace, a cloud provider that's seen its fair share of outages. "The truth is that buying through the cloud is another way of buying computing, and computing is inherently flawed. If you want to make sure those flaws don't hurt you, you have to plan ahead." To help keep your business pain-free in the cloud, we offer these hard-earned lessons at the hands of 10 of the worst cloud storms the Web has weathered. Colossal cloud outage No. 1: Amazon Web Services goes poof That is what many AWS customers experienced this past April, when Amazon's Northern Virginia data center suffered a glitch and -- to use the technical term -- went totally nutso. Click here for the rest of the story -
Freeing yourself from network maintenance gruntwork is a chief selling point for doing business in the cloud. The downside? Standing by helplessly when your cloud vendor's routine configuration change grinds your business to a halt.
